Lee Kappon – Earning a seat for women at the cyber table
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Lee Kappon - Earning a seat for women at the cyber table
Additional Info
| Job title of nominated professional (or team name) | CEO |
| Company (where nominated professional or team is working) | Suridata |
| Website | http://www.suridata.ai |
| Company size (employees) | 10 to 49 |
| Country | Israel |
| Headquarters Region | Middle East |
Overview
Lee rarely has a ‘typical day’. As the CEO of a start-up, hypergrowth cyber tech company, and the mom of a young child, each day presents her with exciting and new challenges. She rather likes the controlled chaos. Lee served 3 years as an Operations Officer in the Israeli Air Force, earned a BA and an MBA from Tel-Aviv University, and gained an appreciation for fast pace and change during her career with two of the world’s leading consultancies. But it was during her time building an investment fund from scratch that the seed was planted for entrepreneurialism.
Lee’s current role as CEO at Suridata pulls upon every ounce of her training and experience. Suridata helps clients with the complex, difficult, and very important challenge of securing their SaaS applications. This is a huge issue in light of the explosion of SaaS.
This offers a glimpse into Lee’s personality. She was introduced to the challenge of securing SaaS applications during her time with Deloitte. She thought “this really needs to be fixed!” and felt compelled to dive in and build a solution. That was the birth of Suridata. Lee’s typical day will find her jumping out of bed, scrambling to the office, selling, writing content, doing interviews, and meeting with the team. The common theme is her incessant drive to find and solve problems.
Accomplishments
Lee has big visions for making a big impact:
1) The most obvious vision is to solve SaaS security for the world. SaaS allows companies to grow fast, be agile, and leverage the very best solutions regardless of their size. It has been central to the growth of companies and entire industries for well over a decade. So securing SaaS just needs to happen to unleash the power of SaaS in the marketplace, and Lee aims to lead the company to do it.
2) Lee wants to help redefine what ‘work’ means for companies and employees. Work should be all about output and production—working smart, not just hard. Lee's company Suridata emphasizes this a lot. They measure by delivery, not by time spent. If someone can do the same job, or produce the same amount of code, in 2 hours that it took the previous person 5 hours, that person has done a better job and they are applauded. Lee encourages a culture that is not about turning employees into robots, but about freeing them to think creatively about how to do their jobs better.
3) Lee tirelessly advocates for women in cyber. She regularly sits on panels and contributes to articles including one that was recently posted in Forbes magazine. Lee believes that diversity within cybersecurity is critical to advancing the industry.
